When Twitter, one of San Francisco's flagship startups, threatened to ditch the city over tax complaints a couple years back, the city caved. Twitter received a giant break, in exchange for a promise to help the struggling neighborhood around its office. Did it? Sort of.

After four years in San Francisco's Noe Valley hood, one of Twitter's dads, Evan Williams, is moving on to something better, and presumably more expensive.

You'd think Scott Jones—the man who created ChaCha, a boutique search engine backed by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—is a wise man. Or at least not the sort who gets busted about his mistress online. He's raised tens of millions of bucks! But nobody ever said startup guys are smart, even if they're in the answer business.

The newest updates to Twitter's "Developer Guidelines" have consequences for regular people, too. But it's likely that some of the pros who make our precious Twitter apps know what changed, because the company dropped its update late at night before the 4th of July.

What's your poison, Valleywag asked a Silicon Valley startup founder last night, Instagram's new Cinema feature or Vine? "Instagram for sure," he shot back. "Easier network effect. Faster gratification. Polished product and more expressive. Twitter has always had this problem with every product."

Someone's gonna snatch up New York's finest local service, and it's not going to be Twitter: AllThingsD says the company just bought Spindle, a sort of poor man's Foursquare.

Twitter closed a deal with Viacom in its big push for TV ad dollars. Since you can already find video highlights on Twitter, the sponsored clips amounts to "not much more than sticking an ad (for a product) on an ad (for a TV show)." The partnership will debut at the MTV Video Music Awards. Is no orgy of self-promotion sacred?

Cnet reports Twitter's top counsel, Nicole Wong, will be the White House's new (and first!) Chief Privacy Officer. If Obama wanted to reach into the private sector, this isn't a bad pick: Twitter's privacy record is generally good.

Twitter is looking for someone with a minimum of 15 years in journalism who's also tech-savvy enough to "shape and drive the next growth phase of Twitter’s partnership with the news industry." I'd love to see that venn diagram.

Vine, previously known for ruining every medium of visual art, has reached new heights: an infinitely looping vision of its king, Jack Dorsey. Vanity has never looked so good—and this might be what actually makes Vine more than a niche novelty.

The microblogging service that's become a newsroom staple across the world is still missing stronger, two-step security offered by Google and Facebook. Security that would've stopped companies like Burger King or the AP from being hacked. In the meantime, we've been sent this memo:

"Man, this unpaid internship sucks," you might say to yourself, "but at least I'm not stuck in a tornado." Tough nuts for these 'terns (click the video above), who are caught in a diabolical attempt at viral marketing: the more you tweet about The Weather Channel, the more violent winds will blow in their faces.

Zynga, cruising on the highway to BrokeVille, is banking on its newest ripoff of Pictionary to be as wildly popular as the first one. Banking so heavily, in fact, that the company is just shamelessly getting famous people to feign interest on Twitter. Ryan Seacrest: diehard iPhone artist.

The AP's Twitter account was just hacked, almost certainly in the same fashion as Burger King and Jeep before it. All of this because Twitter still won't add simple two-step security like Facebook or GMail.

Twitter has been slow and/or totally broken since this morning for many users—what the company is calling a "service issue." Meanwhile, the last tweet from the communications team is about the new music app.